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Why is recycling important?

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Kids Environment Kids Health - National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences

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Reduce, Reuse, Recycle - Three great ways YOU can eliminate waste and protect your environment!

Waste, and how we choose to handle it, affects our world's environment-that's YOUR environment. The environment is everything around you including the air, water, land, plants, and man-made things. And since by now you probably know that you need a healthy environment for your own health and happiness, you can understand why effective waste management is so important to YOU and everyone else. The waste we create has to be carefully controlled to be sure that it does not harm your environment and your health.

What exactly is "waste?"

Waste is anything we throw away or get rid of, that doesn't get used.

How can you help?

You can help by learning about and practicing the three R's of waste management: Reduce, reuse, and recycle! Practicing all three of these activities every day is not only important for a healthy environment, but it can also be fun too. So let's take a minute right now to learn more about waste and waste management, so you can become a key player in making our world a safe and healthy place.

Other stuff you might like ...

Coloring

Coloring books and fun pictures to color.

What's That Word

Scientific Dictionary

Not sure of what a word means?

Hazardous waste and chemicals are harmful to human health. They contain dangerous chemicals and can be a liquid, solid, or gas. Some of them can be found in your house or around you. Learn more about hazardous wastes.

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The .gov means it's official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you're on a federal government site. The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

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Water is a resource. It is something that we have to protect for as long as we want to live on this Earth.

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Clean water is essential for life, but most people in the developed world don't think much about the water they use for drinking, food preparation, and sanitation. In developing nations, however, the search for safe drinking water can be a daily crisis. Millions of people die each year, most of them children, from largely preventable diseases caused by a lack of access to clean water and proper sanitation.

Sandra Postel, director of the Global Water Policy Project and the National Geographic Society's freshwater fellow, said freshwater scarcity presents a growing problem to be addressed during the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in Brazil from June 20 to 22. "It manifests itself in the depletion of groundwater, and the drying up of rivers and lakes upon which people depend for irrigation to grow their food," she said. "The intersection of water scarcity, food security, and a changing climate on top of it all raises a suite of water concerns that urgently need to be addressed."

Much progress is possible. In fact, due to the dedicated efforts of governments and NGOs since the 1992 Earth Summit, safe drinking water has been made available to some 1.7 billion people around the world, with projects ranging from modern piped plumbing to rainwater collection and storage.

But an estimated 880 million people still don't have regular access to clean water. "And we haven't made nearly as much progress on sanitation," Postel said. "Something like 2.7 billion people are without adequate sanitation, so that challenge still looms very large." Policymakers will struggle to lower both numbers even as the planet's population rises by an expected three billion over the next 50 to 75 years.

About 5,000 children die each day due to preventable diarrheal diseases such as cholera and dysentery, which spread when people use contaminated water for drinking or cooking. A lack of water for personal hygiene leads to the spread of totally preventable ailments like trachoma, which has blinded some six million people.

Water woes also trap many low-income families in a cycle of poverty and poor education-and the poorest suffer most from lack of access to water. People who spend much of their time in ill health, caring for sick children, or laboriously collecting water at distances averaging 3.75 miles (6 kilometers) a day are denied educational and economic opportunities to better their lives.

Competition can be fierce for this precious commodity. Agriculture claims the lion's share of freshwater worldwide, soaking up some 70 percent, and industrial uses consume another 22 percent. Watersheds and aquifers don't respect political borders and nations don't always work together to share common resources-so water can be a frequent source of international conflict as well.

Day-by-day demand keeps growing, further draining water sources, from great rivers to underground aquifers. "We're going deeper into debt on our groundwater use," Postel said, "and that has very significant impacts for global water security. The rate of groundwater depletion has doubled since 1960."

Some of Earth's groundwater is fossil water, created when Earth's climate was far different. Today such water is as finite as petroleum. Other aquifers are renewable. "But we're pumping many of them out faster than precipitation is recharging them," Postel explained. "This is the case underneath the breadbasket of India, underneath the wheat and cornfields on the plains of north China, under California's Central Valley. We need to bring withdrawals into balance with recharge."

Humanity's growing thirst also poses a major problem for aquatic ecosystems. "When we take water from rivers, floodplains, and watersheds, those ecosystems bear the brunt of water scarcity and begin to be degraded or disappear," she said. "And that also creates a cost to us, not just to nature, because we also depend upon those ecosystems."

The silver lining, Postel noted, is that many opportunities exist to use the water we do have more productively. Change begins with more efficient management of water resources.

"Seventy percent of all the water we use globally is for agriculture, so that's where we first have to become a lot more efficient through methods like drip irrigation and growing crops that are more suitable to the local climate," Postel said. "We still have too few incentives for farmers to use water more efficiently. Farmers are good businesspeople; they respond to incentives that affect their bottom line."

The United National General Assembly has recognized "the right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation as a human right that is essential for the full enjoyment of life and all human rights." Making that right become a universal reality, and providing each person on the planet with affordable access to the 20 to 50 liters of daily water required to sustain life, is a clear goal for the decades ahead.

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Sustainable Earth: Water - National Geographic

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Clean water is essential for life, but most people in the developed world don't think much about the water they use for drinking, food preparation, and sanitation. In developing nations, however, the search for safe drinking water can be a daily crisis.

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This article is all about children being the future for how we can create sustainability.

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This video helps us see the importance of recycling for our environment.

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Glass, plastic, paper, aluminum: Why bother recycling them? This movie shows you exactly why, and how you can develop your earth awareness!

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Packing a waste free lunch allows us to help with lessening the amount of trash that we produce!